penalties by the exactness of his ritual observances. The unfaithful
Romanist hopes to atone for a life of sin by devoting his property to
the Church, or to charity, when he dies. The Lutheran and the Calvinist,
when false to the call of duty, think to be forgiven their neglect of
the laws of charity by reason of the liveliness of their faith. So the
modern reformer sometimes seems to suppose himself at liberty to neglect
the cure of any of the vices that he loves, because he fancies that he
may take the kingdom of heaven by violence through his devotion to the
destruction of some special vice which he abhors. Thus temperance is
at times preached by men so intemperate in their zeal, that they are
unwilling to make public addresses on the Sabbath, because on that day
they are trammelled by the constraint of decency, which prevents them
from entering freely into the gross and disgusting details in which they
delight. We have the emancipation of negroes sometimes preached by men
fast bound in fetters of malignity and spiritual pride. We have the
destruction of the ruling influence of the clergy inculcated by men
dogmatic as Spanish Inquisitors. We are taught that the doctrine of the
inspiration of the Scriptures is a mere figment, by those who are firmly
convinced that their own inspiration is perfect and unfailing. The
result of all this is the development of characters as deformed as are
the bodies of victims to hydrocephalus or goitre; while, in painful
contrast to such victims, these morally distorted patients bear about
their deformities in the most conspicuous manner, as if they were rare
beauties. So pagan nations, when they embody their ideas of superhuman
attributes, often construct figures having several heads or hands, or
enormously enlarge some particular member of the frame, fancying that
they thus express ideas of wisdom or power more perfectly than they
could by forming a figure whose parts should all present a symmetrical
development.